Marketing sometimes requires significant investments, for example for producing and airing television commercials or for sponsoring sports events. Making sound decisions on how much to spend on what requires estimates of costs and benefits these decisions would bring. Are the benefits worth the costs? This question requires expressing those benefits also in financial terms. This sounds like a management accounting topic—and it is—but it is also of great interest to marketing researchers and practitioners. What are useful methods for estimating the benefits in advance and measuring the benefits afterwards? How are companies actually doing this? What are problems, what are best practices?
The objective of this thesis is to collect information about current practices. You will investigate this topic in the form of cases studies. You identify companies that are likely to have much experience with this topic and negotiate visiting them to conduct interviews and gather other kinds of information for a series of small case studies.
